SaaS Product Pricing

Found an interesting question in LinkedIn a couple of days ago. Someone in my network asked about how they should price their SaaS offering to customers.
All sorts of complex scenarios were discussed and extra charges for infrastructure was suggested.

Frankly, IMHO that type of talk misses the whole point of why SaaS is attractive to many organizations. SaaS is not about technology or the platform, its all about a service that you pay for in a regular cycle. As a potential customer, If you get charged for infrastructure or server hosting, thats not SaaS, its an an additional unnecessary cost which you were trying to avoid in the first place with SaaS.

You look at SaaS because you don't want the higher cost of ownership of buying servers, software licenses and the additional cost of setup.

A secure and stable hosted environment is a given and a customer should not be expected to pay for that as an extra cost.

With a SaaS solution, initial provisioning should be transparent to you and pricing should be simple, a single per user monthly cost possibly on an annual renewal.